That's right, I posted what I felt to be the truth of the matter and that was apparently too much. I have been banned from the Algae Scrubber site.

I guess it was only a matter of time.

I did not do anything that I felt was inappropriate besides making a blatant point about the growth sequence of one user's SURF2 scrubber, to which he had just posted several reasons that might explain his poor growth, and I basically was the one that forced the point that there had to be something else going on in order for his unit to be having such poor performance.

I also posted on someone's thread where they had made a DIY MIX type UAS and I stated that the MIX style not only had never been tested (I assumed that it had not, since I have seen zero pictures of one, only a rendering) and also made some (what I considered) very valid points about the proximity of light and the dangers of such proximity in an operating sump environment (such as salt creep, spray, or a lamp getting submerged on a pump/power outage.

If anyone was following the threads that I posted on earlier today, and you got the e-mail notification that had the text of my posts (around 9am Central Time) would you please re-post them here?

Hopefully, anyone with whom I was communicating will be able to figure out that they need to come here to get a hold of me now.

For the record, on this site, I don't care if you think that I'm full of ----, I'll have a conversation with you about how you feel and let you speak your peace.

Have no fear here.

That being said, if you join simply to bash away, that's a different story. I'm talking about sharing views, opinions, methods, results, about Algae Scrubbers in a way that fosters advancement in this fledgling industry.

If it works, it works, and we want to see it.

If it doesn't work, we will expose that, admit that, discover the reasoning and rationale, and learn from it.

Well, I can pretty much assume from the paths of the past that the MIX idea is completely untested. Not only that, I think it goes against the initial concept of the SURF idea, which was:

First, the enclosed growth compartment increases the dwell time of the water and bubbles inside the unit so that they rub the algae many times before leaving the compartment. This actually reduces nutrients (nitrate, phosphate) to a level lower than the outside water, which allows greener growth to occur sooner (lower nutrients grows greener algae) inside the unit, especially in high-nutrient aquarium water. In other words, the SURF2 creates a lower-nutrient ecosystem inside itself which is different from the rest of the water in your aquarium.

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...because you are now slamming the water through the thing. So that would be one problem, that is, if the above statement were indeed true (again, no published testing to prove that statement, it just sounds really good)

Second, it took me a while to figure out what was going on from your pics but to me it looks like the scrubber box is at the water level/near the overflow and the CFLs are very far away. The light pretty much needs to be right at the top of the box. Of course this will cause all kinds of concerns like what happens when the power dies and the lamp gets submerged by sump water rising, and having a power socket that close to the water all the time in the first place.

I think your growth box looks fine, I think light is your #1 problem and flow is possibly a factor (but unknown whether it is or not - technically, I think more flow would work better)

SM, you are directly contradicting what you state in your product description page, that the SURF creates a low-nutrient environment within a high nutrient system, and that's why it is capable of fast initial growth.

First, the enclosed growth compartment increases the dwell time of the water and bubbles inside the unit so that they rub the algae many times before leaving the compartment. This actually reduces nutrients (nitrate, phosphate) to a level lower than the outside water, which allows greener growth to occur sooner (lower nutrients grows greener algae) inside the unit, especially in high-nutrient aquarium water. In other words, the SURF2 creates a lower-nutrient ecosystem inside itself which is different from the rest of the water in your aquarium.

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I also recall you stating elsewhere that the 14 days growth from day zero is in a tank with high nutrients. So at least we know that this type of growth process is not true in all cases. I have UAS units on 2 tanks with nutrient levels close to what you're running at Nizz and I get tons of GHA. So something else is going on here, there is value in testing.

I got the most growth out of my UAS units when I stopped feeding and let the scrubbes pull the nutrients down. One was able to pull N down to zero, but not P - it's still there. The other just really got going and it a temp system anyways.

So my suggestion is to cut your feeding down to almost nothing - tank/corals/fish in 'survival' mode, and let the scrubbers get started. Worked for me. My L2 UAS test unit never grew that great until I did this (I also removed the fish, except for a goby)

Thanks guys, Floyd and Garf for helping people understand the various scrubber designs and letting us know what works. I can't say I was surprise that you both got banned for the AS site. Keep up the good work.

That forum is doomed to failure if SM keeps this up. The more people he bans for speaking their mind, the more the word will get around, and the less attractive the site will be. I can only see this one growing if it stays as open minded as it currently is.

I am astonished at this. I didn't like that he banned Garf but could (kind of) understand why (sorry Garf, you know I love you really), but FT has done nothing to warrant being banned and has been an unending source of good info and ideas.

I've often supported SM against criticism, even though some of it has been justified but I think he must be losing the plot now.

This idea came to fruition late last night, someone posted on my build thread on AA that since the algae grows 3D so well in an enclosed box that is flooded, why not flood the entire box? Well as I was typing and describing that if the box was full, the water would have to enter from the slot tube at the top, then exit at the top, and water would stagnate and the algae would die. Therefore, the only way to make a totally flooded box work would be to have the water enter at the bottom of the box and exit out the top, and to my knowledge this had not been attempted.

Then it hit me - this would be the perfect design to work in combination with a tuned pipe overflow (full siphon - herbie or beananimal).

So riddle me this - would this design be feasible?

What I envision is something along these lines: You would have to have a watertight acrylic box with a bulkhead of some sort on the bottom of one of the sides, and this is where the full siphon would enter. Due to the high level of flow from this, there would be no slot tube to hold the screen. You could secure the screen in place by another method which I've got floating around in my head but it hasn't quite landed yet. Something to do with magnets and zip ties. The water would fill up the box from the bottom and would then have to exit out the top, either by way of another bulkhead or a spillway or sorts, or both as a failsafe to prevent clogging and overflow.

The difficult thing to figure out will be the lighting. Obviously if you're going to all this trouble, T5HO fixtures would seem like a logical option, but care would have to be taken to not mix water and electricity because they are not happy together.

The advantages I see are that you don't have to deal with a slot tube, spray, clogging, detaching and re-attaching the screen during cleaning, etc.

The disadvantages are that it is not very DIY-able, there is more risk, there is not an opportunity for cooling/oxygenation since the screen is underwater, and starting the screen from scratch may involve a different process.

But it's an idea. What do you think?

EDIT: I did think of a flaw. Getting the siphon to start with a tuned pipe could be problematic, because the pipe would essentially be several inches underwater, making it difficult for the full siphon pipe to purge all the air. Hmmmmm...

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SM:

Unfortunately this would make the screen submerged, which slows the flow by the boundary layer on the screen. There would probably be no growth. You could test it though, with your current unit, by just filling up the box with water after a cleaning.

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Me:

What are you referring to when you say 'boundary layer'? I know I've read you using that term before but don't have the time to dig through it all.

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(wow...that was early on in my knowledge apparently!!!)

SM:

What is a boundary layer, and why is it important? It the layer of water that is microscopically close to the algae; the water molecules that actually touch the algae:

<<NASA pic of boundary layer>>

This boundary layer area of the water has zero flow, because it has to have the same flow as the algae, which of course is zero. Since there is no flow (velocity) here, nutrient transport through it is slow. The faster the water flow, the smaller the boundary layer, and the faster the nutrients can get to/from the algae from the water.

One point to clarify about nutrient exchange: Contact with air is not needed. Scrubbers operate the same whether they are sealed or open (except for cooling/evap), because the exchange is not with the air; it's with the water. The reason algae grows better in an overflow, or where water hits a scrubber screen, or where waves hit the beach, is because the flow is higher here and thus the water's boundary layer is thinner, which allows for better nutrient transfer between the algae and the water. This is what a vertical waterfall scrubber tries to achieve: Fast flow from top to bottom. Further info can be found here:

"As water flows through seagrass [or algae] beds, a boundary layer develops on the sediment surface, as well as on each seagrass [and algae] component exposed to the moving water. The faster the water moves, the thinner the diffusive boundary layer (DBL) becomes, and consequently, the faster the transfer of molecules from the water column to the sediment and/or seagrass [or algae]. It follows then that when currents [flow] are weak, the flux of molecules to the seagrass [or algae] surface may be limited by diffusion through the [boundary layer] (i.e., physical limitation). Under those conditions, many biological sites or enzymes in the seagrass [or algae] tissue are available to assimilate molecules when/if [!] they reach the plant's [or algal] surface.

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Me:

Gotcha. That's kind of what I thought. It sort of blow my idea out of the water (no pun intended), at least on paper. With a 1" pipe pulling a full siphon with a drop of 3 feet, the flow rate is approximately 2000 GPH or 33 GPM, 0.5 GPS. I'm guessing that's not considered to be very turbulent on this scale, the turbulence needed would have to be tantamount to a wave crash. Not looking like a great idea after all I guess. Rats.

"One point to clarify about nutrient exchange: Contact with air is not needed. Scrubbers operate the same whether they are sealed or open (except for cooling/evap), because the exchange is not with the air; it's with the water. The reason algae grows better in an overflow, or where water hits a scrubber screen, or where waves hit the beach, is because the flow is higher here and thus the water's boundary layer is thinner, which allows for better nutrient transfer between the algae and the water. This is what a vertical waterfall scrubber tries to achieve: Fast flow from top to bottom. "

Yeah I thought about highlighting that but the air contact thing described in that post was related to the algae mat not needing to be exposed to the air in order for nutrient exchange to happen, as in you don't need to surge the water across it or take the algae out of the water completely. It is just a function of laminar flow.

The bubbles from a UAS are only there to create the same effect of the laminar flow. The "rubbing" theory is exactly that. A theory. It sounded good on paper but in reality, there is no wet-dry-wet effect in a vertical UAS like he claims, and that is due to surface tension. The bubble simply pushes the algae strand around. I bet if one were to to high-speed microscopic photography, this would be verified. Otherwise, even my take on it is unproven.

The SURF type might do this a bit better, but it's still just water movement. My UAS test unit grows algae everywhere in the chamber regardless of bubble location (and the bar is 90% clogged). I should shut off the bubbles and see what happens.